ART AND THE NEW NORMAL
embracing the moral high ground
I want to return to the value of truth and beauty in the arts
and their relationship to social change.
We are living in a stressful moment in history
in which authoritarian and democratic systems,
both heavily armed and threatening the survival of our species,
are each becoming increasingly crippled
by their own moral and financial corruption and contradictions.
The western democracies, never truly democratic,
have been largely eaten by the vicious,
acquisitive and desperately undemocratic machinations
of its failing neoliberal late capitalist economic system.
The controlling powers at the centre of our so-called democracies are oligarchs who have systematically bought off/corrupted/blackmailed/ seduced the political class the political parties and the media in the western democracies.
Hence this great BUY-OFF
explains the apparent inability of our elected officials to serve us
and to solve growing inequality,
rotting educational and healthcare institutions,
increasing hunger in the fifth richest country in the world,
dead-end jobs,
the rise in suicide rates,
and the increasing disintegration of all social measurements
which define failing societies.
These are not just mistakes or incompetence
but consequences of carefully planned political, economic and cultural changes
to move as much wealth as possible from the mass of the working and middle classes into the hands of the already ultra-wealthy
with having convinced most of us
how it is all for the greater good.
(It has been said that the last 14 years of austerity
has moved the largest amount of wealth in history
from one class to the already wealthy.)
There are two attendant horrors coupled to this.
First, we can all see that climate change
brings ever increasing floods, storms, droughts, fires, heatwaves, melting icecaps
and threats to our food supplies and to the wellbeing of our grandchildren.
We know we need to act NOW.
We know the science enough to pursue the various plans
that have been agreed upon, but then ignored.
Second, even as the democracies corrupt themselves from the inside,
(and we allow them to do so)
the authoritarian regimes also prove incapable
of confronting the same stalking horses;
that they too are becoming destabilised,
unwilling and unable to serve the needs of their own people.
Both sides are locked into their own unfit-for-purpose ideologies
whilst people around the world hunger for food
but also for justice and freedom.
If what I wrote above is a correct outline of today’s world,
what can we do,
how do we confront this,
how do we bring real change,
how do we find a way to stand up and be counted?
Brave lawyers are bringing lawsuits against politicians, political parties,
and powerful corporations to use what are blunt, slow but vital legal procedures
in the struggles to bring change through courts of justice.
Journalists around the world are researching
and attempting to reveal the ugly underbelly of power
in the democracies and the totalitarian arenas.
They face intimidation, arrest and violence against them on the streets,
and they face stonewalling from the wealthy media owners
whose financial bread is buttered by the state or the wealthy.
And then there are arts and artists.
Some artists recognise that increasingly alienating technologies
and growing obdurate bureaucracies
are creating a new arbitrary history for humanity.
They understand that year-by-year
we become more atomised, more jaded, more compromised
and less willing to act in our own self-interest and in concord with the wider public.
Our precious individuality,
so carefully crafted in the Renaissance,
and brought into the light of somewhat democratic laws during the Enlightenment,
has been violently assaulted over the last 40 years.
I make the argument elsewhere that this is no accident,
but a consequence of neoliberalism and its hideous anti-humane ideology.
Their think-tanks know that there are greater profits to be made in stable societies,
and they also know that to weaken us,
to successfully and peacefully steal away our rights,
to filch our financial savings,
to reduce the value of our wages,
to close down our hospitals,
our schools and libraries,
our youth centres,
our childcare,
and all the education in culture and the arts,
they must become all the more convincing
for us to accept that the neoliberal way is the only way,
we must come to believe their myths
that the only god is money,
that avarice is good,
and the very centre of our existence
must be ultra-individualism and materialism.
Day-by-day they pound into us this unpoetic condition,
this hate-filled,
antagonistic,
atomised individualism,
because their thinktanks and advisors know
social solidarity is their enemy,
whether expressed in Black-lives Matter,
anti-war marches
or by trade unionism.
The ruling elites in both the democracies and the totalitarian states
don’t understand why poetry, music, literature and the other arts,
which to them are useless,
are the enemy of their undisputed control,
but they get that the arts and artists can and will undermine their power.
Every year we see the neoliberal media-manufactured-popular-culture
becomes more sexually explicit, more violent and vulgar, and more immature.
Every year the authoritarian leaders in the Anglo-American world,
as Trump, DeSantis and Johnson become more base and more arbitrary.
They continually lower our moral standards,
year by year carving out slipshod, vile new normals,
allowing them to cultivate and call upon our crassest instincts.
And again there are the artists,
some of whom are able to recognise
that the ever more appalling social conditions we now share
must be pointed out,
must be uncovered in compelling stories,
and confronted by metaphor
rather than by ideology and superficial claptrap.
In the struggle against the neoliberal’s vulgar and crass new-normal,
which makes us ever less sensitive to their moral outrages,
to their nudge-and-wink corruption,
to their disdain of normal people,
to their refusal to serve those who vote them into power,
artists need to confront this moral trough with poetry and beauty
filling the trough with our humane moral values
in the face of what otherwise may again be more arrests,
more torture,
more bombings,
more murder and mayhem,
greater disenfranchisement and the destruction of our individuality.
The neoliberal proto-fascist followers
wish to carry the crosses of their religion,
their nationalism,
and their brutish forces
into our places of work, our school libraries, our bedrooms and into our inner lives.
Right now, a thin wall of lawyers, journalists and artists
stands between oppression and individual freedom,
between their ugly world and our beautiful world of poetry.
Artists need to represent, encourage and entice individuals
to join together in communal actions.
Communities need to come together to act.
What I know from both personal experiences and book-smarts
it that we must take the moral high ground
and we must not be violent,
as violence then becomes a part of the DNA of the renewed society.
Do we really want to awaken the morning after the change
to see in the mirror their faces?
Thank you Rob. Hijack is a good way to describe it, or perhaps, 'mugged by footpad people.'
Viewing through an artists lens is a good start but also sharing your reality with others through your work. People are so hungry to understand and to act but feel overwhelmed by the seeming lack of possibilities and by their own atomised isolation. You can grasp their hearts.
That’s a tough article to contemplate Bob. I appreciate the outrage and share it. Hard to know how to respond to this hijack we are subject to. I guess giving ourselves the right to view the world through an artist’s lens is a basic start.